Human Understanding and God-talk in Jāmī and Beyond

1 Introduction

This article has two main objectives. The first is to propose a framework for understanding symbolic and metaphoric representations offered by philosophical Sufis as ones that serve as epistemic interventions necessary for philosophical and theological understanding, not merely as aesthetic devices. In pursuing this aim, the fifteenth-century Sufi philosopher, poet, and theologian ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jāmī (d. 898/1492) will be considered as a representative figure of a long tradition of post-Avicennian Sufism, in virtue of his being the Seal of the Line of Great Persian Poets (khātam al-shuʿarāʾ), a recognised master of the philosophical traditions of his time, and a prominent adherent to and propagator of the doctrines of Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī, who is arguably the most influential thinker in Islamic history.^[1]

The second objective is to situate the philosophical study of post-Avicennian Sufism within a broader academic enterprise that seeks to incorporate imagination and emotions in analytic philosophy, or philosophy understood as clear, critical, and rigorous reflection aimed at the improvement of human understanding. John Cottingham, a leading historian of modern philosophy, a moral philosopher, and a philosopher of religion, has recently been advocating for a “humane approach” to philosophy, one opposed to the “ratiocentrism” that characterises the analytic tradition in which he was trained. He echoes Bernard Williams in his criticism of this tradition’s anxiety to resemble science in the way it is conducted,^[2] not just in terms of its methods of inquiry but also in adopting formal elements such as citation conventions that, while meaningful in the context of scientific research, are transferred from their domain of intelligibility when employed in philosophy.^[3] Among Cottingham’s concerns is the tradition’s neglect of emotions in the way it approaches philosophical questions, one that he shares with other philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, who has emphasised the key role literature plays in the refinement of moral perception.

Through situating my approach to the study of Sufism within this project, I have two further objectives in mind. The first is to stress the centrality of Sufism to premodern Islamic philosophy and the second is to suggest ways in which it can bear on contemporary philosophical questions. The former seeks to rectify what I contend is the influence of ratiocentrism on the academic study of the history of Islamic philosophy.^[4] One example of a ratiocentric bias in the study of Islamic philosophy is Dimitri Gutas’ conclusion, from the consistency and unity of Avicenna’s philosophical system, that it is “free of any other mystical or esoteric aspect … that would represent a different form or body of knowledge and create a dichotomy within the system.”^[5] In Gutas’ imagination, the philosophical and the mystical are two separate domains that cannot come together except at the cost of consistency. Such biases are deeply seated in the modern Western imagination,^[6] and research on the historiography of Western philosophy has recently, even if only partly, thrown them into relief.^[7]

The concerns of this article are more conceptual than historical. Its primary claims, when studying the conception of human understanding that Jāmī offers, are less about what he wrote and believed than they are about its epistemic value, particularly in relation to theology and philosophy of religion. This is not to say that the accuracy of the presentation of Jāmī’s thought is immaterial to the ends pursued herein. It is merely to justify the lack of close textual analysis of his relevant work in the article, a task whose execution the interested reader could find elsewhere.^[8] The article thus begins with an identification of the grounds for contrasting Jāmī’s approach to Islamic philosophy and theology to contemporaneous (i.e. late medieval) ratiocentrism. It is in this section that the notion of pictorial demonstration is introduced. Then, it highlights aspects of contemporary Anglophone critiques of the ratiocentric neglect of emotion and imagination in philosophy, pointing to the pertinence of Jāmī’s concerns and ways in which his method of pictorial demonstration can be of support to their pursuits. Afterwards, Jāmī’s departure in his philosophy of mind from Ibn Sīnā and the cosmological roots of such departure will be discussed, showing how it rests on a form of pictorial demonstration. Finally, I will examine Jāmī’s usage of the image of light to approximate the relationship between the world and God. I argue that this image 1) allows him to introduce distinctions that are hard to introduce by means of logical analysis without the aid of images and 2) helps us understand his philosophy of mind and the epistemology that follows from it.

2 Jāmī contra Ratiocentrism

In Qurʾan 47:19, the Prophet Muhammad is commanded to affirm that there is no deity other than Allah (fa-ʿlam annahu lā ilāha illā Allah). The imperative fa-ʿlam is derived from the root ʿ-l-m, which means knowledge. While the verse could be read as a simple command to have a firm conviction that God is one, such simplicity is not what we find in the theological traditions that historically shaped Muslim understanding of the “revealed” text. To take one example, the celebrated theologian Muḥammad bin Yūsuf al-Sanūsī (d. 895/1489), who was a contemporary of Jāmī, considers it obligatory for all Muslims to have knowledge of God’s necessary attributes, which include his existence. Knowledge, as Sanūsī defines it, is “an affirmation that accords [with reality,] [resulting] either from necessity (ḍarūra) or a demonstrative proof (burhān).”^[9] This is a definition that consciously excludes certain forms of belief, such as 1) belief that is not firm; 2) belief that is firm, but that does not correspond to reality; and 3) belief that is both firm and corresponding to reality, but that is based on authority, rather than evidence.^[10] To define knowledge in this manner is not unique to Ashʿarites, as it bears resemblance to conceptions of knowledge that pervade the history of philosophy, from Plato’s Theaetetus to standard contemporary epistemologists who define knowledge as justified true belief.^[11]

This kind of ratiocentric knowledge was not without its rivals. Plato, author of Theaetetus, also wrote Phaedrus and Symposium, texts that are not less philosophical than the former and that ascribe positive epistemic values to the emotions and the imagination.^[12] In contemporary epistemology too, there is an increasing interest in non-standard approaches, some of whose practitioners draw freely on literature in their attempt to come up with accounts of notions such as inquiry, understanding, and wisdom.^[13] Similarly, the historical tradition of Islamic philosophy and theology had conceptions of knowledge different from the ratiocentric one, even if those were not explicitly theorised. While this might not be the place to dwell on reasons for the absence of such theorisation, a possible one that I hope will be supported by the case made in this article is that definition and analysis were seen as tools employed by reason, which is just one of the multiple faculties involved in the acquisition of knowledge. Thus, it could have been the case that defining knowledge by means of an essential definition or an identification of necessary and sufficient conditions was considered inadequate for the task of arriving at an understanding of a phenomenon inexhaustible by reason.^[14]

I propose that, in communicating an approximation of such an understanding of knowledge, Jāmī resorted to what may be referred to as pictorial demonstration: an act showing that something is true not by means of an argument, but by means of drawing a picture of reality through which particular intellectual difficulties, be them philosophical or theological, are overcome. These would be difficulties shared by a group of people trying to solve a particular problem. For the purpose of this article, I distinguish between two kinds of pictorial demonstration. The first (PD1) is one that offers a framework akin to a model, through which problems are solved by means of a rearrangement of their constituent propositions. Imagine two inquirers, Ahmad and David, are trying to solve intellectual problem x. Both Ahmad and David assert each of the propositions p1, p2, and p3 independently, but are faced with difficulties reconciling them together. A pictorial demonstration proposes a way of imagining the way p1, p2, and p3 are arranged that produces a potentially satisfactory reconciliation of the three propositions. The proposed picture is not arrived at by means of conceptual connection proposed by means of an argument, but rather through imagining the relationship between the propositions differently. In other words, the propositions are not introduced by introducing a further proposition p4 that magically links two propositions together.^[15] The second kind of pictorial demonstration (PD2) is one that solves an apparent contradiction by introducing a visual distinction enabled by the use of images, metaphors, or analogies. So far as this article is concerned, ultimate philosophical (or theological) justification will always rest on PD2, even if proximate justifications can rest on PD1.

At this point, it is apt to introduce two interrelated distinctions, one doctrinal and the other methodological, between Jāmī’s philosophy of mind and that of Ibn Sīnā, which I will discuss in more detail later in the article. Ibn Sīnā’s articulate soul (nafs nāṭiqa) is composed of multiple faculties, the most exalted of which is reason. In his philosophy of mind, imagination (wahm)^[16] is a faculty that humans share with animals and that must always be subordinated to reason. In Jāmī’s philosophy of mind, reason and imagination (wahm) are the two most exalted faculties of the nafs nāṭiqa, which he prefers to speak of as qalb (literally: heart, but Intellect for the purpose of this article). While he agrees with Ibn Sīnā that reason is often clouded by imagination, he asserts, as do other adherents to the doctrines of Ibn ʿArabī, that there are cases where reason must accept the guidance of imagination. Such a differentiation among cases in which reason and imagination interact results from two key dictates of Akbarian^[17] metaphysics and cosmology. First is that at the level of Ultimate Reality (haqīqat al-ḥaqāʾiq), transcendence and immanence are of equal (in)significance, for such a reality escapes all differentiation. Since both transcendence and immanence are ultimately of the same significance, reason, and imagination, knowledge of the general and that of the particular are considered to be of equal importance in the pursuit of knowledge. Second is that for Jāmī, the imaginative faculty is a point of contact with the imaginal realm, an ontological domain in which subtle realities take corporeal form that makes them representable to humans in the form of images or symbols. Hence, imagination is privy to realities that reason is incapable of accessing.^[18]

On the methodological front, it is important to note that Ibn Sīnā delineates the faculties of the articulate soul by means of ratiocination. This is not unexpected, as reason is the most exalted faculty in his philosophy. As for Jāmī, he does not reason his way to his doctrine, but rather unashamedly postulates it. What matters for our purposes is that Jāmī’s philosophy of mind is arrived at pictorially, and not rationally. The difference in method between both philosophers is a perfect illustration of the difference in each’s preferred method of demonstration, Ibn Sīnā’s is logical and Jāmī’s is pictorial.

Histories of Islamic philosophy hardly mention Jāmī, except in passing.^[19] In our present day, this towering figure of medieval Islam is known to different people in different ways. In the contemporary Arab world, he is the author of an advanced text in Arabic grammar, to practitioners of the Naqshabandiyya Sufi order he is known as one of the order’s greatest masters, to Persophiles he is one of the greatest medieval Persian poets.^[20] Of the few scholars who would recognise him for the innovative thinker that he was, even fewer people will be acquainted with the way he thought imagination shaped rational inquiry.^[21] Yet, such a disregard for Jāmī’s philosophical capabilities is a relatively modern phenomenon, for these were widely recognised during his own lifetime. His contemporaries and biographers certainly knew of his philosophical capacities, and his fame extended beyond his native Herat, which lies in modern-day Afghanistan, Westwards to Istanbul and Eastwards to India. Jāmī’s prominence as a philosopher is of great significance for the thesis I seek to advance in this article, for it makes easier a contrast between Jāmī’s approach to philosophy and theology and that of Islamic ratiocentrists.

Being the patron of philosophy that he was, Mehmet II commissioned multiple arbitrations between Avicennian peripatetic philosophy (falsafa) and Sunni speculative theology (kalam), the two traditions that along with Sufism, dominated the intellectual scene of Islam’s post-formative or post-classical period.^[22] Initially, Mehmet was only interested in arbitrations between falsafa and kalām, both of them ratiocentric. Later, he realised that it was not only these two approaches that claimed superiority in arriving at ultimate philosophical and theological truth. An obvious missing claimant was philosophical Sufism, as Sufis did also claim possession of the most exalted truths. Upon expressing his interest in an arbitration between the three schools, the Sultan was advised that the man most fit for the task was no other than Jāmī. The result was Jāmī’s production of a short treatise of about seven thousand words, entitled al-Durra al-Fakhira (The Precious Pearl).^[23]

While Mehmet had commissioned an arbitration, the Durra is in fact, as I argue in a forthcoming work, more of a translation of the Sufi doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd into a philosophical–theological language.^[24] The significance of its being a translation, for our present purposes, lies in the fact that Jāmī neither refutes the arguments of his opponents nor demonstrates his. Instead, he mostly contrasts his theological positions to those of his adversaries, offering them as alternative possible ways in which these philosophical questions can be conceived. He does not defend his philosophical and theological propositions by means of putting forward further supporting propositions. What he does is that he offers a new way of imagining certain doctrines, a new arrangement of propositions and problems – a pictorial demonstration. In this case, Jāmī does not yet resort to images, metaphors, or analogies. The new picture he presents rests on the acceptance of the ontology of waḥdat al-wujūd.^[25] This notorious ontology, which grounds his theology, is not defended but is merely postulated.

Given the possible “heretical” implications of the doctrine, Jāmī finds himself, in works that constitute the background to the Durra, pressed to clarify how these implications are evaded. This he seeks to achieve by means of pictorial demonstration (PD2), as I discuss below. One can say that Jāmī’s theology and ontology of waḥdat al-wujūd are presented by means of the drawing of pictures rather than the provision of arguments. In the former, he does not use images while in the latter he does. This is the reason complexity is introduced in the notion of pictorial demonstration: in some cases, it does not involve the usage of images; and in others, it does. So when Jāmī draws a picture of a theology that rests on waḥdat al-wujūd, his demonstration is pictorial in the first sense. However, when he draws a picture of waḥdat al-wujūd itself, his demonstration is pictorial in the second sense, for he does resort to images to introduce distinctions. The former is a proximate pictorial demonstration and the latter is an ultimate one. Hence, this article hopes to establish the importance of poetry for philosophical and theological understanding.

3 Contemporary Dissent from Ratiocentrism

I have referred in the introduction to John Cottingham’s opposition to ratiocentrism and his advocacy for an approach to philosophy that he considers to be more humane. Cottingham’s “humane philosophy” is one that seeks to draw on all the resources of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge and understanding.^[26] To use a favourite example of his, he seeks to avoid what Eleanor Stump calls “cognitive hemianopia”: a “blindness to the kinds of insights associated with the right cerebral hemisphere.”^[27] What is referred to here is a neuroscientific suggestion that our logical abilities are mostly exercised through our left hemispheres, while our intuitions and imaginations are largely the responsibility of the right hemisphere. It is tempting to see some resemblance between Cottingham’s distinction between two functions of the human intellect and Jāmī’s distinction between reason and imagination, especially if, after Ibn Sīnā, he holds that these functions of the soul are mediated by the brain, with different parts of the brain responsible for different functions. It seems that Cottingham, like Jāmī, instead of making imagination entirely subordinate to reason, seeks to put them on a par with each other. As interesting as this resemblance is, it must be noted that Cottingham and Jāmī do not share an understanding of the nature of the human intellect, hence of the nature of its constituent faculties, the manner of their interaction, and their philosophical capacity.

Cottingham does not seek to replace a left-hemisphere philosophy solely based on reason with a right-hemisphere philosophy solely based on intuition, imagination, and emotion. Instead, he proposes a complementarity between both that brings about philosophical understanding that is not merely the sum of what reason and imagination combined teach us about the world, but one that is transformed by the combination. To use another example of his, the resultant mixture is analogous to that which emerges not from adding salt to popcorn, but from adding yeast to flour.^[28] Yet Cottingham will insist on admitting limits to reason’s capacity that Jāmī would not. To take a classic example, Cottingham is pessimistic about reason’s capacity to demonstrate the existence of God. At times, Cottingham seems to admit that it is possible for people to come to believe after considering a philosophical argument. However, he is sceptical of the possibility of producing “watertight” proofs of the kind medieval philosophers, Jāmī being one of them, will insist on providing.^[29] As a post-Enlightenment philosopher, Cottingham is convinced that critiques of natural theology by figures such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant “close down the possibility of rational arguments establishing the existence of God … [T]he Humean and Kantian strictures suggest there could hardly be any method of arguing for” the existence of anything beyond the domain of the empirical, even if such existence is possible.^[30] For Cottingham, this invites a discussion of alternative ways in which we can be philosophically engaged in God-talk. Such alternatives, as is to be expected, are provided by his humane approach.

While Jāmī is a mystic who maintains that ultimate reality is ineffable, this does not preclude him from making claims about the existence of his God and the nature of his attributes. In fact, he begins the Durra with a rehearsal of Ibn Sīnā’s contingency argument, taking it as an occasion to discuss the difference between necessary and contingent existence.^[31] These metaphysical assertions are perfectly legitimate for Jāmī, even if he might agree with Cottingham that they are not “cold evidence” that is immediately acceptable by the sceptic and that even if they demonstrate the existence of God, they cannot effect a full conversion or change of heart.^[32] He follows Ibn ʿArabī in asserting that had reason been sufficient for knowledge of God, revelation would have been redundant.^[33] Jāmī is thus in broad agreement with Cottingham, but cannot be fully understandable through his framework.

In lieu of a “detached” rational inquiry, Cottingham advocates for an “attached” inquiry that makes us more “porous,” borrowing the latter term from Martha Nussbaum.^[34] Being porous entails being emotionally open and willing to yield and be epistemologically receptive to evidence, a receptivity is opposed to the cold and critically evaluative inquiry characteristic of reason. In her seminal Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum advances the thesis that the well-conducted delivery of philosophical content rests on the ability to choose the form suitable for it.^[35] Whether conscious of it or not, in her insistence that philosophical questions have different natures and call for different methods of delivery, Nussbaum is warning of something akin to Aristotle’s metabasis, which has been received and developed in Ibn Sīnā’s logical works as naql al-burhān.^[36] In brief, naql al-burhān is the mistake of resorting to the methods of argumentation in one science that belongs to another. In this conception of sound logical argument, a science’s subject matter dictates the method of argumentation suitable for it. The upshot of this is that Nussbaum argues that in moral philosophy, the employment of narrative and emotion is key for the acquisition of moral understanding.

Implicit in Nussbaum’s work is a critique of a medieval conception of the intellect, which must have been influenced by Ibn Sīnā and in which the highest form of knowledge is that of reason.^[37] In this conception, the apprehension of essences and knowledge of forms are exclusive to angels and immaterial souls that are too exalted to know particulars given their lack of immersion in earthly life.^[38] The implication is that ratiocentric knowledge trivialises the particular, the kind of knowledge that is the product of immersion and involvement, and that is an implication of embodiment. This kind of critique would also apply to an Avicennian epistemology in which knowledge of forms is the highest kind of knowledge.

The context of Nussbaum’s critique is her discussion of an “ancient quarrel” between philosophers and poets or philosophy and tragedy, which had Plato exclude the poets from his ideal city. The dominant conception of philosophy, including ancient philosophy, that Nussbaum criticises has split Plato into two figures or two sets of issues, with texts such as Symposium considered literary as opposed to philosophical.^[39] Yet, in her view, poets address the same questions that philosophers do, namely how to live and how to improve the soul, even if their methods are different and involve an identification with a hero through emotions and embodiment. At this point, Nussbaum interestingly argues that Aristotle’s ethical views are similar to those of poets.^[40] This is a point reminiscent of Alasdair MacIntrye’s argument in Which Justice? Whose Rationality that rational inquiry is scarcely separable from the substantive values of a particular tradition.^[41] It can then be said that Nussbaum is after a conception of rationality that is not defined in opposition to emotions and imagination but that sees them as complementary. To put it in her own words, she is looking for a kind of reason that is a “natural ally” to imagination.^[42] This alliance between reason and imagination is of great importance if we are to avoid giving free rein to imagination, a faculty which especially susceptible to the acceptance and invention of what Iris Murdoch would call self-consoling fantasy.^[43] This is a danger that Nussbaum is herself aware of, but the way in which we can be guarded against it seems to be absent from her treatment.

Douglas Hedley, whose Platonism makes him closer to Jāmī than Cottingham and Nussbaum are, discusses the reason-imagination question in a manner that brings us closer to Jāmī and his formulation, in which they can be seen as one as I show at the end of this article. When it comes to blindness to the merits of imagination, Hedley is a critic of both analytic and continental philosophy. In both traditions, he notes, “language came to replace imagination as the key to the relation of mind to world.”^[44] Hedley is an advocate of a “poetic-imaginative Platonism”^[45] through which he seeks to offer an anti-reductionist account of theology by rooting imagination in the doctrine of creation in the image of God.^[46] In the same way, Jāmī is opposed to Ibn Sīnā’s conception of the imagination, Hedley is opposed to Spinoza’s view of imagination as confused and inferior to reason. Like Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā, Spinoza considers philosophy superior to religion just as reason is superior to imagination. Religion, in this understanding, expresses the subtle and abstract truths of philosophy in a manner understandable by the masses.^[47] These figures, to whom both Hedley and Jāmī are opposed, take imagination’s function to be communicational rather than epistemic. In their conception, unlike that of Cottingham, the reason-imagination combination adds nothing to the possessor of rational knowledge. Epistemically, imagination would only be useful to those who “cannot attain to purely noetic or discursive thought.”^[48]

It is interesting to see how, as a Platonist, Hedley conceives of or justifies Plato’s attitude towards the poets, whom, as I mentioned earlier, he excludes from his ideal city. It is not arts or the imagination per se that Plato attacks, Hedley asserts, but only the “pessimistic anthropology of the tragedians.”^[49] By contrast, Plato is seen as an optimist who recognises there being a “rational divine within,” knowledge of which is the subject of the Delphic exhortation to know oneself. This is a metaphysical, or epistemic, or metaphysical-epistemic interpretation of the Delphic exhortation that Hedley takes to be superior to what could be called the moralistic conception, one that interprets it as an instruction to know one’s limit so as not to upset the divine. In other words, Hedley defends a Plato concerned about the human potential for apotheosis denied by the way his contemporaneous poets imagined humans. What is at stake is the inculcation of a moral imagination that would impede humans in their “apotheotic” adventure. By implication, Hedley would see a compatibility between Platonism and a conception of poetry that supports it.

Hedley does in fact discuss poets who, like his Plato, are anthropological optimists. These are ones who have a particular conception of human beings that they then communicate by the use of mental images. The latter are devices the employment of which results in some kind of a mental vision, through the eye of the mind,^[50] an image not unusual in Platonic literature and that is commonly employed by Sufis.^[51] One poet he quotes on this, whose same lines Cottingham also quotes, is William Wordsworth:^[52]

This spiritual love acts not, nor can exist

Without Imagination, which in truth,

Is but another name for absolute power And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,

And reason, in her most exalted mood.

Interestingly, these lines discuss imagination together not only with reason, but also with emotions too, tying the three inextricably. Spiritual love cannot exist if it was not for “Imagination,” which is also “reason, in her most exalted mood.” What Wordsworth seems to be emphasising is some kind of wholeness, wherein reason, imagination, and affective states (such as love) are three different elements of human cognition that are to be balanced or harmonised, becoming, in their most exalted forms, one and the same thing. So between the potential pitfalls of cold reason and unbridled imagination, Hedley introduces his version of Platonism as a via media.^[53] In doing so, I believe, he provides potential for a framework that brings together the concerns of Cottingham and Nussbaum and those of Jāmī, who offers a pictorial account of the Intellect as an image of the undifferentiated reality grounding multiplicity. Just as he sees all as one in the cosmos at large, he sees all as one in the microcosm. Yet, the essential unity does not detract from the reality of multiplicity. To explicate this paradoxical account, he will resort to drawing a picture. Thus, like Hedley’s poet, Jāmī is not “argu[ing] for certain propositions, but communicating” that which he experienced by means of the mind’s eye.^[54] The mind’s eye is itself the Intellect that possesses both reason and imagination. But since it knows by means of seeing and not thinking, its best mode of communication is pictorial.

4 Dethroning Reason

As briefly discussed above, ratiocentric tendencies are not unique to Western philosophy. In the medieval Islamic tradition, suspicion of imagination was ubiquitous. Avicenna invented the faculty of wahm partly to explain how our imagination interferes in our philosophical pursuit, leading us into error. Nonetheless, after Abū al-Naṣr al-Fārābī, he does credit imagination with the positive functions alluded to above. As for the negative function, as Deborah Black shows, it is precisely that of leading human beings into error.^[55] This philosophy of mind soon became popularised in kalām, partly through the influence of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), who was himself greatly influenced by Ibn Sīnā. In his longest treatise on logic, Ghazālī seeks to explain why people still err in philosophy if logic was really a tool through which true judgments could be distinguished from false ones. The first reason he provides, which is not of much concern to the present article, is that not all people are as intellectually capable as others. The second reason is that it is very difficult to distinguish the conclusions of wahm from those of reason.^[56] In his theological texts, such as Moderation in Belief (al-Iqtiṣād fī al-Iʿtiqād), Ghazālī gives examples of how wahm leads to error in theology.^[57] The text only discusses the negative epistemic aspects of imagination, which is how the faculty becomes depicted in the speculative theological tradition.

As stated above, Ibn Sīnā considered knowledge of the forms to be the highest form of knowledge, which is not the case for Jāmī. This does not come as a surprise, for Sufis, since the time of Ghazālī, have spoken of a realm beyond that of reason that does not contradict reason, but that is nevertheless inaccessible to it. The conception of such a realm is one that we find in the works of the likes of Ghazālī, Shihāb al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī, ʿAyn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadhānī, Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, not to mention Ibn ʿArabī himself. Writing a few centuries later than these figures, Jāmī’s work exhibits a unique combination of the rational and the pictorial, in a manner that makes it possible to explain through his ideas how he proceeds from the conception and function of imagination rooted in Ibn Sīnā’s ratiocentrism to his pictorial demonstration and demonstrative employment of a new conception of imagination.

In the Durra, Jāmī speaks of the realm beyond reason in a language recognisable by Avicennians. The latter recognise that humans often declare impossible that which is, in reality, possible, or even necessary. A classic example is the affirmation of a being that is not material or that is neither inside nor outside the world. The latter might initially look like a contradiction unless it is accepted that in virtue of its materiality, it is categorically wrong to ask about its location. When such a being’s existence is denied, it is not reason that is denying it, but the imagination of an individual who cannot conceive of something that exists but that is not a body. Jāmī says that just as imagination can declare possible beings impossible when it seeks to make judgments outside its proper remit, reason declares possible truths impossible when it seeks to make judgments outside its proper domain. These supposed higher judgments are then not irrational, but supra-rational.^[58] This is the way Jāmī justifies his postulation of waḥdat al-wujūd instead of its demonstration. He merely proposes the position as the basis of the theological discussions that are going to follow. No further clarification of the nature of that realm is provided. All that Jāmī provides is an indication that this realm is accessed by an individual’s innermost being after they undergo a process of spiritual improvement. What we are left with is that the highest form of knowledge is not accessible to reason and is arrived at by means other than devising arguments. This is the first major departure from Ibn Sīnā’s epistemology, his philosophy of mind, his understanding of the role of reason, and possibly that of imagination. It is significant, however, that Jāmī here speaks of the inner sight, for like Hedley’s eye of the mind, it invites an image of knowing by seeing instead of thinking. Imagination yields superior knowledge, it is not just a tool for communication.

Implicit in Jāmī’s conception of the limitation of reason is a justification of pictorial demonstration. He does not merely argue that reason is limited, but draws on arguments we find in his predecessor Akbarian, Dawūd al-Qayṣarī, that seek to show that all rational knowledge is rooted in something other than reason. Since this “something” is the basis for rational knowledge, it has to be superior to it. Hence the view that there must be a realm beyond reason. They do not consider the positing of such as realm as merely a Sufi claim, but rather they conceive of that realm’s existence as a philosophical necessity. This allows Jāmī to stand on solid grounds when claiming that reason has to be complemented by another kind of knowledge. His argument is not a phenomenological one that reflects on the benefit of particularised knowledge in the manner that Nussbaum’s does. It is one directed at reason itself, exposing its limits to itself and leading it to humble recognition of its need for other faculties. One such faculty is that of imagination, to whose version of philosophical theology I move in the next section.

The argument against ratiocentrism starts from the structure of rational knowledge. The foundations of medieval Islamic philosophy, ratiocentric or not, rest on the assertion that knowledge is either conceptualisation (taṣawwur) or assent (taṣdīq).^[59] Each of these is either self-evident or reached by means of a demonstration. In this conception, all knowledge is somehow composite, since assent is composed of multiple conceptualisations (of a subject, a predicate, a relation between them (nisba), and according to some: either an affirmation or a negation of the relation),^[60] and conceptualisations are in turn composed of simpler conceptualisations, such as the conceptualisation of “human” being composed of the simpler conceptualisations “rational” and “animal.” Akbarians take this as an occasion to problematise the possibility of knowledge, if rational knowledge was all there is. If the basic building blocks of knowledge that are conceptualisations are composed of further simple elements, then we end up with an infinite regress of simpler elements that would make it impossible to arrive at any judgment. The solution to this problem is that conceptualisations cannot be the ultimate grounds of knowledge. Knowledge as to rely on something that is absolutely simple, and in virtue of its simplicity, can be rendered neither a conceptualisation nor an assent. It has to be beyond the remits of reason. For Jāmī, this simple entity will be wujūd itself.

It is here that a fundamental distinction between Jāmī’s Akbarian ontology and that of Ibn Sīnā becomes of great significance. Wujūd is for Jāmī an entity that precedes essence.^[61] Thus, it must precede all multiplicity and cannot be known by means of a process that involves multiplicity. To experience wujūd, for Jāmī, is to experience that which is absolutely simple, and for it to be experienced it can only be experienced by that which is absolutely simple. It follows from this that for Jāmī, for reason to know anything at all, it must rely on an initial perception of wujūd by something that is superior to it.^[62] This, for Jāmī, is the Intellect, of which reason is but a single faculty.^[63] On this view of reason, it no longer reigns over the human soul and there is no reason to suppose its superiority to imagination.^[64] The exact relationship between both faculties is one which Jāmī arrives at pictorially, as I discuss in the final section of this article.

5 Introducing Pictorial Demonstration

For Jāmī, as for innumerable Islamic philosophers and theologians, the human being is a microcosm to a macrocosm that is the universe as a whole.^[65] Just as the universe has material and immaterial aspects, the former being the world of bodies and the latter being the world of spirits inhabited by angels, human beings have bodies and souls. The material aspect of human beings, just as the material aspect of reality, is governed by the immaterial aspect, meaning that the body is governed by the soul in the same way the material world is governed by angels. One implication of this is that the individual faculties of the human soul are akin to individual angels: each has its proper function in the governing of the body. For Ibn Sīnā, human beings had five external and five internal senses, the latter including reason and imagination.^[66] This conception of inner senses is also to be found in Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam, on which Jāmī comments approvingly. The inner senses belong to the immaterial part of the human being, which makes them correspond to the angels in the macrocosm.^[67] Thus, imagination and reason are both faculties corresponding to angels, which makes them both exalted and have positive roles. However, just as angels can sometimes get full of themselves and question divine wisdom, such as they did when Adam was appointed vicegerent in Q2:30-34, reason and imagination can become too self-absorbed to realise that none of them encompass reality as it is. Rather, each of them has been endowed with the capacity to know and represent certain aspects of reality. If they limit reality to these aspects, then both reason and imagination can be reasons for an individual’s misguidance.^[68]

This fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship between reason and imagination. Imagination is no longer inferior to reason, but on a par with it. It is not just important for the communication of understanding to less sophisticated individuals, but has a function that it fulfils to its bearer, and it is capable of providing an understanding of aspects of reality that reason cannot access.^[69] These realities are not necessarily suprarational, for these can only be accessed by entities above reason, such as the Intellect. It would thus be apt to refer to these realities as extra-rational ones, the communication of which is directed at the faculty of imagination. In its reception of these extra-rational realities, imagination complements reason by giving it material to think about and through which it can arrive at conclusions.

This leaves us with the question of how Jāmī arrives at his conception of both faculties and their functions. If we look at Ibn Sīnā in the development of his faculty psychology, we find him inviting us to a reasoning exercise in which he tries to develop a well-argued account of human cognition and the psychological conditions of its possibility.^[70] Ibn Sīnā realises that there are different functions of the human soul that can only be performed by means of positing corresponding faculties that fulfil them. This does not seem to be what Jāmī is doing, for his faculty psychology develops out of a reading of Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ, which he and his fellow Akbarians admit have been given to him by the Prophet Muhammad himself. What Ibn ʿArabī is thus supposed to have given is not an argument, but a picture of reality received by the imagination and admitted by reason, which is on a quest to account for human cognition. What reason finds in this is an answer to two of its questions: 1) how do we account for human cognition, which was Ibn Sīnā’s question, and 2) how do we access what is suprarational. Because Jāmī’s reason leads to the admission of there being suprarational perception, it has to ask itself questions about human cognition that Ibn Sīnā does not ask. Part of the result is a modified faculty psychology that is arrived at pictorially.

The pictorial explanation of human cognition gives us a multilayered human psyche. On one level, we have reason and imagination, each of them responsible for capturing a certain aspect of human knowledge. On a higher level, we have the Intellect that accesses higher domains of knowledge that make the ones accessible to reason and imagination possible. Yet, by relating the Intellect to the suprarational domain, Jāmī puts himself in the doubly difficult situation of having to explain how this is possible. It is here that we find ourselves in the domain of the notorious doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd.

That Jāmī is a mystic makes it tempting to read him as a critic of reason who abandons a cataphatic theology for an apophatic one. This, I argue, is a temptation that must be resisted if we are to appreciate the epistemic value of his critical project. Jāmī is dissatisfied with a philosophical theology of transcendence that contents itself with affirming the existence of God and the necessity of his attributes. He wants to engage also in a theology of immanence through which God can be spoken of positively, as a personal God whose presence can be felt in every living moment. Reason, Jāmī holds, can only do the former, resulting in the kind of austere classical Ashʿarite theology that refuses even to assert that God is good.^[71] To replace this kind of theology with his, Jāmī engages in a rational philosophical discourse (RPD) that paves the way for a pictorial rearrangement of premises (PD1) that is then supported by a pictorial employment of images (PD1) that shields PD1 from analytical or logical criticism. In the case of faculty psychology, RPD dethrones reason, PD1 puts imagination on a par with it, and PD2 situates them within a broader metaphysic.

In the Durra, Jāmī is primarily engaging in PD1. He offers a pictorial rearrangement of theological doctrines on the basis of waḥdat al-wujūd, which he says is indemonstrable but reasonable. In his defence of its reasonableness, he defends the reasonableness of other positions that could “mistakenly” be declared impossible. He offers the example of the supposed impossibility of a single being’s existence in two different places at the same time. While their adversaries would declare this impossible, and hence be opposed to the belief stemming from waḥdat al-wujūd that all entities are manifestations of the one God, they would still accept, on a theological basis, that the angel of death simultaneously appears to all individuals dying at the same instant.^[72] The point Jāmī is trying to make is that the basis on which waḥdat al-wujūd is rejected implicates its opponents in the denial of theological beliefs that they do hold. He seems to believe that if the latter are to be considered reasonable, so will waḥdat al-wujūd have to be. While this might be convincing to Jāmī’s adversaries who share his theological outlook, a reader from outside the theological tradition could still find a contradiction in both cases. This might be the reason why Jāmī, in other texts, offers another way of conceiving waḥdat al-wujūd, this time employing PD2. I will end this article by discussing the image through which Jāmī employs it. This is the analogy, Qurʾanic in origin and widely prevalent in Islamic (and other) philosophical circles, between light and God.

Jāmī finds the light analogy particularly helpful when speaking of waḥdat al-wujūd.^[73] The point he seems to stress is the paradox of light being both that which makes things visually perceivable and the only thing that is visually perceived.^[74] The usage of this analogy comes in the not-unusual context of discussing wujūd. Jāmī contrasts three positions on God’s wujūd, those of Rāzian kalām, Avicennian falsafa, and Akbarian Sufism. In the first, God exists but is not wujūd itself. In the second, God exists, is wujūd itself, but his wujūd is separate from the wujūd of his creation. In the third, God exists, is wujūd itself, and his wujūd is not separate from the wujūd of creation.^[75] The distinction in whose introduction Jāmī wants to employ light pictorially is that between God and creation, and at the same time he wants to do this without separating them from each other. He wants to demonstrate a distinction that does not entail separation, which can protect God’s transcendence without scarifying his immanence.

Jāmī speaks of different ways luminosity can correspond to wujūd. A created being, that is not existent in itself but capable of receiving existence, is capable of reflecting light, but is in itself dark and not luminous. This is not the case with God’s necessary existence: God is essentially luminous, not dark. However, according to Jāmī, a body can be essentially luminous without being light in itself, such as is the case with the sun. Even though it casts light on dark bodies making them visible, it is not identical to light in itself. Only light is both luminous and identical to itself.

Jāmī’s ontology entails three main levels of wujūd: general wujūd (wujūd ʿāmm), noetic wujūd (wujūd ʿilmī), and extramental wujūd (wujūd ʿaynī). If these are to be expressed through the light analogy, general wujūd will be light itself, noetic wujūd will be dark bodies, and extramental wujūd will be light as reflected through the dark body. If we take a flower as an example, when we visually experience a flower in a garden, what we really see is light as reflected through it. It is not light itself that we encounter directly, nor is it the flower, but light mediated by the flower. Neither is the visual experience of the flower possible without its reflection of light, nor is that of light possible without reflection by the flower or any other object. Whenever light is experienced, it is never in its purity, but always reflected in a manner determined by the object through which it is reflected. The object never changes light itself, but only the way in which I, the observer, experience it. Light in itself is never limited by an object, and there are potentially infinite colours through which it could be reflected. Thus, the possibilities through which light is reflected are unlimited, the limitation comes from there being a perceiver who fails to see it unless it is reflected in a limited manner that is perceivable. If one experiences a flower and says: I have experienced a flower, it is a true statement. Yet, if one experiences it and says: I have experienced light, this, too, is a true statement. The truth of each statement is perspectival, and the affirmation of each perspective does not logically entail the denial of the other. Hence, both can be affirmed without contradiction. Jāmī wants to justify waḥdat al-wujūd in the same way.

One reason light is particularly apt for pictorially demonstrating Jāmī’s philosophy is that his metaphysics is one of manifestation. “Before” creation, God is hidden and it is through creation that he becomes manifest. Creation is thus the process of making God manifest, even if it is not God himself who becomes manifest. This “apparent” contradiction is one that Jāmī’s light analogy solves. For Jāmī, created beings stand in the same relationship to God as bodies do to light: unless his light of existentiation is cast upon them, they will never appear in the world. The usage of this language of appearance, however, implies that before creation, these creatures enjoyed a degree of reality wherein they were hidden. Jāmī’s metaphysics distinguishes between creatures before receiving light and after receiving light. Before receiving the existential light, they have a noetic existence (wujūd ʿilmī) in God’s knowledge. After receiving the existential light, they have an extramental existence (wujūd ʿaynī) in the world that we experience.^[76] Just as it is really light that is experienced when we visually experience the flower, it is only general wujūd that is experienced when we perceive created beings. General wujūd, like light, is too pure to be perceived by limited beings, but is perceivable in an infinity of possible way, and these are the infinite possibilities of creation. Yet in order to be perceivable or experienced by limited beings, i.e. creatures, at all, it has to be determined in a particular way.

This, for Jāmī and his fellow Akbarians, is the essence of creation: God making perceivable some of his infinite qualities to finite creatures by means of creation. Thus, when individual beings are perceived in the world, what is really experienced is God. This, however, does not entail that the individual beings themselves are God. They are distinct from him even if they are inseparable: the existence that makes them perceivable in the world is God’s which secures their inseparability, but they ontological status is that of limited beings reflecting finite aspects of God, which ensures their distinction from him.

Finally, we return to the question of human cognition. How is the light analogy pictorially demonstrating its nature and structure? While this is a question whose answer might not be explicitly provided by Jāmī, some philosophical speculation could bring us to one that can be plausibly attributed to him. For Jāmī, general wujūd is but one aspect of a single entity which is referred to in Akbarian literature as the First Delimitation of the Divine Essence (al-taʿayyun al-awwal).^[77] This entity grounds Jāmī’s entire philosophical and theological project, but there is no room in this article to elaborate on this.^[78] What matters for the purpose of this article is that another aspect of First Delimitation is the Ultimate Reality accessible to the Intellect by means of direct contact. This means that what contacts Ultimate Reality, which is general wujūd, is the Intellect. Like that reality, it is simple in itself and has no trace of multiplicity. It can then be deduced that relationship between the one and many with respect to the Intellect is analogous to the relationship of the one to the many with respect to general wujūd. The many faculties and powers of the human soul, be they internal or external, are some of its perfections. It is they that perceive multiplicity, whether multiple physical entities, multiple concepts and essences, or multiple images. One can thus say that God makes himself knowable by means of the multiplicity of existents perceivable by the multiplicity of faculties of the Intellect. Just as the multiplicity of existents is limited reflections of the perfections of the one wujūd, the multiple faculties of human cognition are limited reflections of the perfections of the one Intellect. Thus the Intellect in its simplicity encounters wujūd, reason and imagination encounter essences and images, and external senses encounter individual beings. The light analogy allows us Jāmī to communicate a coherent conception of waḥdat al-wujūd, and allows for the development of an account of the creation of human beings in God’s image that also sheds light on Jāmī’s epistemology. Relationships that could be very difficult to work out logically turn out to be easier if approached pictorially. This approach which Jāmī takes in communicating his metaphysics turns out to be a useful framework for understanding his philosophy in its unity.

6 Conclusion

Much of philosophy today, and by implication philosophical theology, is done in a manner affected by the analytic-continental divide. While this certainly allows students of Islamic philosophy and theology to employ the tools of the respective schools, it comes with the risk of treating historical traditions as if they have operated through the dynamics of this twentieth-century post-Kantian division. There are multiple ways in which these traditions would resist such a reading, one of them is the way Jāmī’s Akbarian philosophy is keen on the ideals celebrated in both traditions. On the one hand, it is keen on clarity, precision, and rigour in the domain of dialectic and argumentation. On the other, it is aware of the limitations of rational argument and the dangers of flattening out knowledge of reality by reducing it to a set of propositions. The result, as I hope to have shown in this article, is the articulation of a worldview that has a place for both a realist logic that sets some parameters on reasonable belief and for knowledge that either grounds logic or complements it in a manner that potentially enriches human experience by taking seriously its affective and imaginative dimensions. Thus, in order to study this and similar traditions, it seems to be fruitful to draw on the works of philosophers like John Cottingham and Martha Nussbaum who are aware of the limitations of the analytic-continental divide and who are developing a philosophical vocabulary that can go beyond it. However, it is important not to force this vocabulary on historical traditions that have not contributed to the philosophical formation of the said philosophers. A more careful approach, in my view, is to allow this vocabulary to be enriched by the tradition towards whose understanding it is employed.